SPAM

A quick glance through my junk mail folder suggests I’m only a few clicks away from:

• more money
• a cheaper mortgage
• a new Russian bride
• a dynamite deal on Viagra
• really getting to know Britney Spears and Paris Hilton

It’s the math on Spam that becomes a little terrifying. Thre are 210 BILLION emails sent every DAY and that works out to more than 2 MILLION emails a SECOND. A CIO interview with Microsoft offers that every day, MSN Hotmail processes about 4 billion email messages and up to 90% of the volume is spam. Aggregate the whole gamut of providers and the global average for unsolicited mail rests around 80% of the total volume (about 168 billion spam messages a day). eMarketer shows that spam is decreasing but show the findings as a percentage. Knowing that overall computer and internet use continues to rise, let’s assume the number of spam messages is also growing but at a slower rate than utility.

So, why do they do it? The simple answer is money. The book “Inside the SPAM Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side” details one series of events for a single spammer looking to bring the masses to a porn site. In order they are:

1. buys 2 million email addresses for $200
2. filters addresses against a known list of bad addresses
3. sends 10,000 spam emails in 17 minutes
4. 967 people follow link within 12 hours
5. earns $3000

Spammers know that conversion is about 10% (one in ten of us will follow a link). While there’s money to be made creating and sending the messages, the real gold might be the sale of a proven list. In the example above, the spammer buys 2 million addresses knowing that 99.5% of them are useless. The bad addresses are sold with the good ones and the bad ones are filtered out. For us, we need to be a “bad address” and we can get there by not being a “good address”. A “good address” clicks on spam links.

Now, to be fair, the Hormel company in Austin Minnesota hasn’t really put up too much of a fight when their brand name became one of the most common noises heard across the planet. The official SPAM site is tremendous and if offers recipes, games and store where you can buy SPAM logo’d items. I think they’re missing the boat though; shouldn’t SPAM.com also provide information about…well…spam?

I hope my new Russian bride likes the new work at home job I got her...and my fingers are crossed that Paris and Britney enjoy the SPAM can wine charms.